Perseverance on NASA’s Mars research seemed empty on first attempts at rock samples

adventurer perseverance Drill into the bottom of the planet’s Jezero crater to extract a finger-sized sample of flat rock slabs. The agency said Friday that the drill appeared to be working as intended, but that no stones appeared to have entered the sample tube.

Engineers are working to find out what happened.

“While this is not the ‘hole-in-one’ we expected, there is always a risk of opening up new avenues,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s chief science officer.

Ken Farley, a NASA project scientist, said the next step would be to use a camera mounted on a robotic arm to examine the crater “and see what’s below.” They may see a crushed rock core, or they may find that the sample has turned to sand, he said, “The rock properties may be different than we expected.”

“It’s shrunk a little bit because the tricky parts of the machine are working well, the technique is working well, but it doesn’t look like Mars is cooperating,” Farley said, adding that he didn’t see the glitch as a long-term problem. problem. “We will survive.”

NASA aims to collect up to 31 samples in tubes and store them for capture in about a decade. Plans call for samples to be brought back to Earth in the early 2030s on another mission with the European Space Agency.